House (though the Prussian Conservatives strongly desired to see one), so, also, there was no Federal Ministry.  In every modern State there is a Council formed of the heads of different administrative departments; this was so universal that it was supposed to be essential to a constitution.  In the German Empire we search for it in vain; there is only one responsible Minister, and he is the Chancellor, the representative of Prussia and Chairman of the Council.  The Liberals could not reconcile themselves to this strange device; they passed it with reluctance in the stress of the moment, but they have never ceased to protest against it.  Again and again, both in public and in private, we hear the same demand:  till we have a responsible Ministry the Constitution will never work.  Two years later a motion was introduced and passed through the Reichstag demanding the formation of a Federal Ministry; Bismarck opposed the motion and refused to carry it out.

He had several reasons for omitting what was apparently almost a necessary institution.  The first was respect for the rights of the Federal States.  If a Ministry, responsible to Parliament, had existed, the executive power would have been taken away from the Bundesrath, and the Princes of the smaller States would really have been subjected to the new organ; the Ministers must have been appointed by the President; they would have looked to him and to the Reichstag for support, and would soon have begun to carry out their policy, not by agreement with the Governments arrived at by technical discussions across the table of the Council-room, but by orders and decrees based on the will of the Parliament.  This would inevitably have aroused just what Bismarck wished to avoid.  It would have produced a struggle between the central and local authorities; it would again have thrown the smaller Governments into opposition to national unity; it would have frightened the southern States.

His other reasons for opposing the introduction of a Ministry were that he did not wish to give more power to the Parliament, and above all he disliked the system of collegiate responsibility.

“You wish,” he said, “to make the Government responsible, and do it by introducing a board.  I say the responsibility will disappear as soon as you do so; responsibility is only there when there is a single man who can be brought to task for any mistakes....  I consider that in and for itself a Constitution which introduces joint ministerial responsibility is a political blunder from which every State ought to free itself as soon as it can.  Anyone who has ever been a Minister and at the head of a Ministry, and has been obliged to take resolutions upon his own responsibility, ceases at last to fear this responsibility, but he does shrink from the necessity of convincing seven people that that which he wishes is really right.  That is a very different work from governing a State.”

These reasons are very characteristic of him; the feeling became more confirmed as he grew older.  In 1875 he says: